Monday, February 19, 2018

Obliviate is a new app from MakeUseOf that lets
you send
self-destructing messages. It’s great for sharing secret
messages with friends that you don’t want sticking around on their
phone, among other use cases.

… The app lets you set a timer between 5 and
180 seconds for how long your messages will last. Once the recipient
opens it, the message will disappear after a set time. And if you
change your mind, you can immediately obliviate messages and bypass
the timer.

Best of all, the obliviate
is free and has no ads; never will. Plus, you cannot
take screenshots in the app or copy the content of the messages (this
feature is currently available on Android only, coming soon on iOS).
This prevents others from recording messages you intended to be
private.

… Coming soon, obliviate hopes to add
encryption, support for audio, pictures, and videos, custom
notification sounds, and more! We hope you enjoy the app.

A private school in east Georgia intends
to start drug-testing its oldest students.

The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer reports that
Brookstone School in Columbus recently announced that the
drug-testing of students in grades 8-12 will be voluntary next school
year — and then mandatory in succeeding years.

And yes, of course they can get away with doing
that as a precondition of
acceptance or attendance. They’re a private school.
But here’s the thing: parents are waiving their children’s
privacy rights. Now I know a lot of parents are just fine with that
because they want to know if their child is using drugs. And
somewhere, I’m guessing, this school actually/hopefully has a
written policy about what happens with the results, for how long they
are retained, and with whom they might be shared. And what is the
testing facility’s privacy policy? Will they be sent the students’
names as identifiers or just numbers/IDs? And who might they share
results with and under what circumstances?

Google, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon have made it
easier for developers to add human cognitive capabilities (also known
as artificial intelligence) within their own applications. You need
not be a machine learning expert to build a computer program that can
recognize objects in photographs, or one that transforms human
speech to text or even a chatbot that converses with people in
natural language.

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.